


The Purple Hibiscus

by Pink_Siamese



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-01
Updated: 2007-08-01
Packaged: 2017-10-07 07:03:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/62632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pink_Siamese/pseuds/Pink_Siamese
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is the price of forgetfulness?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Purple Hibiscus

It was worth the exorbitant price, this privilege of washed hair and clean skin, to have a breathtaking view of lower Tortuga while the heated silk of scented water embraced his limbs. For an extra shilling, a cocoa-skinned seductress with heaving bosoms and long coiling hair would float soft white gardenias in the water. He never felt himself of such high birth as to demand sacrifice of a plant's most beautiful gift; flowers existed for themselves, not for his adornment or his amusement. He was content to breathe in the jasmine clinging to the outside walls. It pleased him to recline in the bath while steam condensed on the panes of the open window, trolling the corridors of his memories, plucking them from the pocket of his mind and running their satin luxuriance through calloused fingers. He allowed the past to devour him, swallowing him with its soft, seductive throat.

The act of being clean, with its attendant smells of soap and clean vigorous cotton, its sensations of warmth and fragrant moisture, dredged up thoughts of Elizabeth. The world had looked at him in those days and had seen a stalwart specimen. Upright and poised, manners polished as a brass button and possessed of a reputation like a cathedral: built slow and sturdy, mortared with sweat and carved in suffering, pleasing to the eye of God and man. And now here he was, reduced to the sort who would spend the last of his savings on a bath and a shave and a blowjob at an establishment full of colored whores.

He chose the Purple Hibiscus because the only white girls were scullery girls, cooks and laundresses. They were a handful of pearls thrown onto a black sand beach. The lips that sucked his cock would be full and dusk-colored and would speak with the lingering exotic musicality bequeathed by ancestors who fished the tepid waters with spears and hiked through jungles clad in body paint and found themselves easily overwhelmed by the ghost-men in their giant war canoes. They were of this strange water-locked earth, goddesses who blessed him with forgetfulness. He would not frequent a house of half-breeds, or high yellas, or quadroons. Only the cocoa browns and red tones of New Spain would suffice.

There was nothing in these women to remind him of _her_.

The door opened and a woman came inside, her figure the summation of all abundance that ever ripened in the world, her long hair black as night and spilling as an undulant river across her shoulders, gathering in soft curling piles on the shelf of her breasts. Her origins were mixed, the darkness of Africa and the copper of the Yucatan melding together into something unexpected, a forbidden pleasure never before tasted. She was beautiful, like orchids thriving in the permanent shade of the rain forest. She brought him clean towels. She dried his face with them, and toweled his hair. She conveyed the tenderness of a mother with the efficiency of a professional. She poured more heated water into the tub. She lathered his face and shaved him, lingering with the blade as she scraped it across his skin. She performed this task with a skill and meticulousness that he himself had never managed to achieve. Her hand was a cartographer, her blade her brush and paints; she had mapped countless faces with accomplishment and affected sentiment. She reached into the cloudy water. His cock rose to meet her fingertips; the memories of similar service tingled in its skin. She bent over and took him into her mouth. He grasped the curled iron sides of the tub, eyes closing at the sensation of her lips. He sighed at her deft and larcenous tongue. He kept his hands to himself and let out a moan, giving fervent thanks for her detachment, her thrilling expertise. His breath shortened into gasps. When he came it was like an explosion, artillery fire behind his eyelids. An expert navigator of that most mercurial part of a man's sea, she gripped his cock and rolled with the waves of semen, swallowing them down. She took him into her soft throat. There was nothing misleading, nothing seductive; just what any man could buy if his pockets jingled. When his limbs had gone through their dance of tightening and releasing, and his breath was sinking back down into tranquil and lulled, she let go of him. His shriveled manhood floated beneath the soapy water. It looked lost.

She abandoned the washroom.

James Norrington sat in the candlelight and wept bitter tears and hated himself.


End file.
